On Friday 25 April 2008, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> folks, hi,
> after talking some time ago to cameron dale about debtorrent, i
> finally posted this but could do with comments, feedback, ideas etc.
> major edits needed on upload / verification but i put it out there
> anyway as "good enough" and "will edit later".
> http://advogato.org/article/972.html
> p.s. also put in proposal for talk @ debconf8
You wrote:
> It's all hunky-dory, does the job, removes a headache from the
> Mirrors, makes us independent of single-point-of-failure
> infrastructure, and, this is the best bit: by the simple expedient of
> providing a different dpkg.conf file and different GPG key master
> packages, you have provided the world with a way to distribute other
> material in an entirely distributed fashion. entirely as Free
> Software. without requiring a web site. For example, Miro, the
> Distributed Media Player, requires that you upload your content to a
> web site, and you subscribe to RSS feeds. They're basically recreating
> the Debian Distribution system. Surely it would be better to merge the
> two?
On that note, what about other systems that are in development? Observe:
http://oscomak.net/
"The OSCOMAK project will foster a community in which many interested
individuals will contribute to the creation of a distributed global
repository of manufacturing knowledge about past, present and future
processes, materials, and products. OSCOMAK stands for Open Source
Community On Manufacturing Knowledge. We will develop software tools to
enable the creation of this knowledge repository: to collect, organize,
and present information in a way that encourages collaboration and
provides immediate benefit. Manufacturing "recipes" will form the core
elements of the repository. We will also seed the repository, interact
with participants, and oversee the evolution of the repository."
http://heybryan.org/mediawiki/index.php/Skdb
"Engineering knowledge is learned information about how the world works
and ways to make it do what you want. Social or societal knowledge is
the set of all knowledge in a society. Therefore, societal engineering
knowledge is a society's knowledge about how to make the world do what
it wants.
Specialized social networks seem to be easier to create and gain
momentum under amplifying effect of the internet. We can aggregate the
collective effort of hundreds of individuals to build a large knowledge
base [for engineering/software projects], but making use of that
knowledge is difficult because it has no structure or well-defined
relation to other knowledge.
The societal engineering knowledge database (skdb) is a group of
programs designed to aggregate, store, present, and process clusters of
engineering knowledge, described as 'packages' in analogy to linux
software management tools like APT, yum, CPAN, rpm, etc.. These project
packages might include simulation and visualization tools for tweaking,
development tools to rewrite data about the package, explicit
well-documented links to other projects, etc. The success of APT and
friends comes not from any magical software intelligence, but rather in
the wide-spread social diffusion and easy accessibility: the ability to
easily get new components, and just as easily throw them away; users
can play with them, see how the work, and implement changes on the
spot.
Physically building projects will become much easier when we have
fabbers like RepRap, hextatic, molecular nanotechnology etc., but in
the mean time we have humans who can track down materials and tools (by
following detailed instructions) to make the particular blackbox that
they need for a project. The point to remember is that computers cannot
pull together apparently unrelated concepts to make a new functioning
whole, but there are many humans eager for an opportunity to contribute
just this sort of knowledge.
Skdb started as a method for finding a feasible self-replication
process: the idea is to come up with as much social knowledge (facts
that can't be derived from first principles) as possible, throw it in a
pot, connect all of the possibilities together, and fish out the closed
cycles. (Hamiltonian paths?)"
These two projects are essentially the same thing, and so the meta
attribution that you mention on your document describing the debtorrent
system, the same too there. But in the case of oscomak/skdb, there is
*grounding* such that not only are we talking about compiling for
specific ISAs on microprocs, but for physical configurations of
fab-labs and other interesting environments for the completion of the
cybernetic loop, if that makes any sense. Eric Hunting said it
recently:
On Thursday 24 April 2008, Eric Hunting wrote:
> These are intriguing ideas. It looks like you're going one step
> beyond the concept of a Open Source Everything database as I had
> described in TMP2. I was basically concerned with the concept of
> having a formalized document structure for developing and cataloging
> 'recipes' for the independent fabrication of artifacts. But here you
> seem to be going farther by putting that kind of information into a
> very specific semantic structure that can then be reduced to machine
> control software. This parallels the vision of Jacque Fresco, which
> I've been reading about lately. Deriving from the mid-century
> expectations of Total Automation, Fresco's notion of 'cybernation'
> -the wedding of social and economic structures and global information
> gathering to Total Automation, would, of necessity, involve
> formalized semantics that can be reduce to machine code. Looks like
> all these ideas of group Open Source knowledgebases and their
> integration into specific systems may be reaching some sort of
> critical mass. Perhaps the Internet is finally coming into its own
> ultimate purpose at last.
http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/Open_Source_Everything_Project
Thoughts on collaboration? I am on freenode and other servers, other
protocols if you want to chat more immediately, or phone me.
- Bryan
________________________________________
http://heybryan.org/
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